In his early work Narahara focused on people who were living in isolation from the everyday world, such as monks in a Trappist monastery or the inmates of a women’s prison. His work aimed at creating a ‘personal document’, he aspired to ‘a process of laying bare the inner form by thoroughly depicting the exterior’ (Ikko Narahara). Walking a tightrope between description and abstraction, objectivity and a personal narrative, Narahara transcended the journalistic documentary photography then prevalent in Japan. Furthermore, Narahara displayed a particular facility for abstraction and the staging of everyday scenes in strict graphic compositions as in, for example, the series ‘Tokyo, the ‘50s’…

At the beginning of the 1970s Narahara went to the USA. This was the location of his best-known series ‘Where Time Has Vanished’. During extensive trips across the country he photographed the mythic sites of the American Dream, vast landscapes, Indian reservations, automobiles, motels and casinos. In contrast to fellow photographers Gary Winogrand and Robert Adams, Ikko didn’t take a critical approach to the American scene. Ikko Narahara’s work is primarily poetic with surreal elements

‘As I drove across the land in Arizona and Utah and New Mexico, I began to have hallucinations that this was not the earth at all and that I had been thrown onto some other planet…’ ~ (Ikko Narahara)